Aquara

The name comes from the water, and the arms say so openly: there is an amazon holding two hydriae and pouring. Aquara stands half way up the slope above the valley of the Calore, with the Alburni behind it, and on clear days the eye reaches from monte Gelbison to the sea and to Capri. Spring fountains are scattered over the whole territory, and at the castle, in the highest part of the village, the water came from far off: it came from the spring of the Condotti along an aqueduct of which pieces of ruin can still be seen, and it came out of a grotesque mask that is still there. Lower down, at Madonna del Piano, a dwelling complex of the Roman age came to light, the only one in the valley of the Calore.

The village appears for the first time in a document of the eleventh century, and its feudal lords make a list worth remembering: Guglielmo d'Altavilla, son of Tancred; Pandolfo Fasanella; Tommaso Sanseverino; and Ettore Fieramosca, the hero of the challenge of Barletta. It was Fasanella who got Aquara into trouble: he took part in the conspiracy of Capaccio, between 1245 and 1246, and in reprisal the army of Frederick II destroyed the castle and the abbey of San Pietro below the village. The castle had been built between 1190 and 1230; rebuilt afterwards on a date nobody knows, it still keeps the eagle of the Spinelli, the family of duke Fabrizio to whom the county passed in the sixteenth century and which held rights over castle and lands until 1884. The patron is San Lucido, a Benedictine monk who died in 1038, and the church of San Nicola di Bari, of about the eleventh century, has three naves divided by five monolithic columns on each side.